A FEW DAYS ago, I finally bought a pair of AirPods. Apple’s funny-looking ear-computers have been available for about a year, provided you were willing to order them online and wait six weeks for delivery.

The world’s biggest tech companies have devoted huge resources to voice assistants such as Siri or Alexa. Yet despite a user base numbering in the millions, these apps have serious flaws as researchers at Zhejiang University, China, recently showed.

THE FIRST TIME Alex Acero saw Her, he watched it like a normal person. The second time, he didn’t watch the movie at all. Acero, the Apple executive in charge of the tech behind Siri, sat there with his eyes closed, listening to how Scarlett Johansson voiced her artificially intelligent character Samantha.+

The consumer IT giants — such as Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft — have all invested heavily in voice technology. Analyst Gartner estimated two years that 30 percent of our interactions with technology will be through ‘conversations’ with smart machines by 2018.

History may remember the decade between 2007 and 2017 as a brief and peculiar period when people barely spoke to their phones. Apple launched the iPhone in June 2007, catapulting the smartphone – and its ubiquitous touchscreen – into the ascendancy.